Word: wilderness
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Your Jan. 12 article about Thornton Wilder gives an impression of one whose life and writings are without aim or pattern; and that impression, I believe, is correct. Wilder is the best representative of the American he describes-lonely, nomadic and insubmissive...
Your treatment of Thornton Wilder . . . will bring to the attention of thousands the talents of this man-certainly one of the truly great intellectual-literary men of our day. His is indeed the catholic mind...
Your fine story on Thornton Wilder reminded me of the time two years ago when he was the Charles Eliot Norton professor here at Harvard. WHRB, the Harvard radio station, has a tradition of staying on the air 24 hours a day with classical music for about two or three weeks previous to exams. Mr. Wilder heard about this and was disturbed that he had no radio ... He came down to the station one day and asked if he might just sit in the studio. We assured him that this would be possible . . . Thereafter, for the next couple of weeks...
Then usually a walk around the snowy town, with Wilder ducking into a baroque church, or discoursing on the quality of local theater or on what happened at this corner during the resistance uprising. Each evening we would dine together, then retire before...
...Wilder talked a lot in those four days, to his own amusement. Says he: 'Usually, when somebody asks me to talk about myself, I go all shy and change the subject.' But once, in a moment of exuberance, he cried : 'I have no secrets from you, Massa Baker!' And in a letter he wrote after I left, he said : 'You came to Innsbruck to extract by pickax a few timid and grudging facts from a fretful hermit, and what you got was Niagara from the Ancient Mariner.' He exhorted me to become a headmaster...